n justified such
a luxury, the sculptor utilized the stone lining of the walls with equal
skill, but in a slightly different spirit. The figures on the facade had to
be seen from a great distance, and were exposed to the full light of the
Mesopotamian sun, so that their colossal proportions and the varied
boldness of their relief had an obvious justification. The sculptures in
the interior were smaller in scale and were strictly _bas-reliefs_. With
the shortening of the distance from which they could be examined, their
scale was made to conform more closely to the real stature of human beings.
In some very spacious halls a few of the figures are larger than life,
while in the narrowest galleries they become very small, the alabaster
slabs being divided into two stories or more (see Fig. 115).[338]

There is another singularity to be noticed _apropos_ of these sculptures.
The themes treated outside are very different from those inside the
palaces. The figures in the former position are religious and supernatural,
those in the interior historical and anecdotic. There is much variety in
the details of these narrative sculptures, but their main theme is always
the glorification, and, in a sense, the biography of the sovereign.

[Illustration: FIG. 115.--Bas-relief with several registers. Width 38
inches. Louvre. Drawn by Bourgoin.]

In the Egyptian temple the figures which form its _illumination_ are spread
indifferently over the whole surface of the walls. In a Greek temple, on
the other hand, sculpture was confined with rare exceptions to the upper
part of the building, to the pediments chiefly, and the frieze. The
Assyrian method was neither that of the Egyptians nor that of the Greeks.
At Nineveh, the sculptor did not, as in Egypt, sow his figures broadcast
over the whole length and breadth of the building, neither did he raise
them, as in Greece, above the heads of the crowd; he marshalled them upon
the lowest part of a wall, upon its plinth. Their feet touched the soil,
their eyes were on a level with those that looked at them; we might say
that they formed an endless procession round every hall and chamber. The
reasons for such an arrangement are to be sought for, not in any aesthetic
tendency of the Assyrian artist, but in the simple fact that only in the
stone cuirass, within which the lower parts of the brick walls were shut
up, could he find the kindly material for his chisel. Nowhere else in the
whole building